THE VOYAGE.
“Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising,—
Stamp and go, boys! up she’s rising,—
Round with a will! and up she’s rising,
Early in the morning.
What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—
What shall us do with a lubberly sailor?—
Put him in the long-boat and make him bale her,
Early in the morning.
Hurrah! hurrah! up she’s rising.”—
&c. &c. _ad infinitum_.
_Anchor Song._
Clear and joyous as ever a summer’s day came out of the heavens, was the
12th of June, 18—, when the good ship _Walrus_, with her steam up, her
boats secured, and everything ready for sea, lay lazily at single anchor
off Blackwall-stairs. The weather was as still and calm as weather might
be. The mid-day sun, brilliant and healthful, imparted life and animation
even to the black and unctuous waters, that all that morning had, in
the full strength of the spring tide, been rushing past her sides. The
breeze, light and fitful, just stirred the air, but was altogether
powerless on the glazy surface of the stream, which sent back, as from a
polished and unbroken mirror, the exact double of every mast, yard, and
line of cordage, that reposed above it. The ships lay calm and still. The
outward-bound had tided down with the first of the ebb, and were already
out of sight, and the few sails that still hung festooned in their bunt
and clew-lines, lay as motionless as the yards that held them. Like light
and airy dragon-flies, just flitting on the surface, and apparently
without touching it, the river steamers were darting from wharf to wharf;
while ever and anon a great heavy sea-going vessel would grind her
resistless way, defying wind and tide, and dashing the black wave against
the oily-looking banks.
Steamer after steamer passed, each steadily bent on her respective
mission; and the day wore on—yet there lay the _Walrus_, though her
sea-signalling blue Peter had hung from her fore-truck ever since
day-light, and the struggling and impatient steam would continually burst
in startling blasts from her safety-valves. The tide was slackening
fast; the chain cable, that all that forenoon had stretched out taut and
tense from her bows, like a bar of iron, now hung up and down from her
hawsehole, while the straws and shavings and floating refuse of the great
capital began to cling round her sides.
“It is a great honour, no doubt, to carry an ambassador, with Heaven
knows how many stars of every degree of Russian magnitude in his train,”
said the Parson, who, seated on the taffrail, with his legs dangling
over the water, had been watching the turning tide, and grumbling, as
ship after ship in the lower reaches began to swing at her anchors,
while three or four of the more energetic craft were already setting
their almost useless sails, and yo-ho-ing at their anchors, preparatory
to tiding up; “it is a very great honour, and I hope we are all duly
sensible of it; but, like most great honours, it is a very particular
nuisance. These Russian representatives of an autocrat majesty must fancy
they can rule the waves, when all the world knows it is only Britannia
that can do that. They have let the whole of this lovely tide pass
by—(the Parson cast his eyes on the greasy water)—and fancy, I suppose,
that daddy Neptune is bound to supply them with a new one whenever they
please to be ready for it.”
“Why, Mate!” said the Captain, as a smart sailor-like looking fellow
fidgeted across the quarter-deck, with an irregular step and an anxious
countenance; “is this what you call sailing at ten a.m. precisely? Most
of us would have liked another forenoon on shore, but your skipper was so
confounded peremptory; and this is what comes of it.”
“What is one to do, sir?” said the Mate, who seemed fully to participate
in the Captain’s grievance. “These Russians have taken up all the private
cabins for their own particular use, and occupy half the berths in the
main and fore-cabins besides—we cannot help waiting for them. They have
pretty well chartered the ship themselves—what can we do? But,” continued
he, after a pause, during which he had been looking over the side, as the
steamer now began evidently to swing in her turn, “I wish we had gone
down with the morning’s tide.”
“We should have been at the mouth of the river by this time,” said the
Captain, “if we had started when we ought.”
“Yes,” said the Mate, “and we should now be crossing the dangerous
shoals, with fair daylight and a rising tide before us.”
“Why, surely you are not afraid,” said the Parson; “that track is as well
beaten as the turnpike road.”
The Mate shrugged his shoulders, and stepped forward, giving some
unnecessary orders in a tone unnecessarily sharp and angry.
“Well, Birger, what news? Do you see anything of them?”
The individual addressed was a smart, active, little man, with a quick
grey eye, and a lively, pleasant, good-humoured countenance, who was
coming aft from the bridge of the steamer, on which he had been seated
all the forenoon, sketching, right and left of him groups of shipping on
the water and groups of idlers on the deck.
“Anything of whom?” said he. “Oh! the Russians. No, I don’t know. I
suppose they will come some time or other; it does not signify—it is
all in the day’s work. Look here,”—and he opened his portfolio, and
displayed, in wild confusion all over his paper, the domes of Woolwich,
the houses of Blackwall, the forests of masts and yards in the Pool,
two or three picturesque groups of vessels, a foreign steamer or two,
landing her weary and travel-soiled passengers at the Custom-house—and,
over leaf, and in the background as it were, slight exaggerations of the
ungainly attitudes in which his two friends were then sprawling. “If
you had found something as pleasant as this grumbling to fill up your
time with, you would not be wasting your eyes and spoiling your temper in
looking for the Russians. They are going back to their own country, poor
devils! no wonder they are slow about it. Did you ever see a boy going to
school?”
“Birger is not over-fond of the Russians,” said the Captain.
“Few Swedes are,” said Birger; “remember Finland and Pomerania.”
“Besides, it is not over-pleasant to have a great White Bear sitting
perpetually at one’s gate, always ready to snap up any of one’s little
belongings that may come in its way. The Russian fleet is getting
formidable, and Revel and Kronstadt are not very far from the mouth of
the Mälar.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Birger, gallantly; “we are the
sons of the men who, under Gustaf, taught that fleet a lesson.”
“You are a gallant set of fellows,” said the Parson; “and Sweden would
be a precious hard nut to crack. But your long-armed friends over the
water know the value of a ring fence, and would dearly like a seaboard.
Only fancy that overpowering country, which is now kept in order by
the rest of Europe, only because, just at present, it lies at the back
of creation, and cannot get out of the Baltic, Black, and White Seas,
to do harm to any one,—only fancy that pleasant land, with its present
unlimited resources, and Gothenborg for its Portsmouth, and Christiania,
and Frederiksvärn and Christiansand for its outports—a pleasant vision,
is it not, Mr. Guardsman? Don’t you think it probable that something of
this sort has soothed the slumbers of the White Bear we were speaking of,
before this?”
“Did you ever hear of Charles the Twelfth? He taught that White Bear to
dance.”
“He taught that White Bear to fight,” said the Captain, “and an apt
scholar he found him. There was more lost at Pultava than Charles’s
gallant army.”
“There are men in Sweden yet,” said Birger, slightly paraphrasing the
legend of “Holger.”
“There are,” said the Parson; “and if you could only agree among
yourselves, you might have hopes of muzzling the White Bear yet. Another
union of Calmar?”
“O, hang the union of Calmar; there is no more honesty in a Dane or
a Norseman than there is in a Russ. We are not going to have another
Bloodbath at Stockholm. My mother is a Lejonhöved,[1] and I am not likely
to forget that day.”
“I should have thought you more nearly connected with the Svinhöved
family,” said the Parson; “but depend upon it, unless you men of the
north can make up your quarrels, the White Bear will chop you up in
detail, and us after you.”
Birger, who, in some incomprehensible way, traced his descent from the
founder of Stockholm, the great and terrible Earl Birger, was a smart
young subaltern in the Royal Guards, and though his present dress—a
modest and unpretending blouse—was anything but military, his well-set-up
figure, firm step, and jaunty little forage cap stuck on one side of his
head, sufficiently revealed his profession. From his earliest youth he
had discovered a decided talent for drawing, and in accordance with a
most praiseworthy custom in the Swedish service, he had been travelling
for the last twelvemonth at the expense of the Government, and was now
returning to the “Kongs Ofver Commandant’s Expedition,” with a portfolio
filled with valuable sketches, and a mind no less well stored with
military knowledge, which he had collected from every nation in Europe.
The Captain had fallen in with him at the Swedish ambassador’s, and,
being himself something of an artist, had struck up on the spot a sort of
professional friendship with him. The pleasant little subaltern was thus,
from that time forward, enrolled among their party; and though their
acquaintance was not yet of twenty-four hours’ standing, was at that
moment talking and chatting with all the familiarity of old and tried
friendship.
“Here come those precious rascals at last,” said he, breaking off the
conversation, as a train of at least half-a-dozen carriages rattled
down to the landing-place, and counts, countesses, tutors, barons,
children, dogs, governesses, portmanteaus, bags, boxes, and trunks were
tumbled out indiscriminately on the landing-place. “Heaven and earth!
if they have not _impedimenta_ enough for an army! and this is only
their light marching baggage either. All their heavy articles came on
board yesterday, and are stowed under hatches. I’ll be bound we draw an
additional foot of water for them. Hang the fellows! they are as bad as
Junot, they are carrying off the plunder of half the country.”
“Like the Swedes under Oxenstjerna,” said the Parson; “but what need
you care for that? The plunder—if it is plunder—comes from England, not
Sweden.”
“It will lumber up the whole cabin, whether it comes from the one or the
other,” said Birger; “we shall not have room to swing a cat.”
“We don’t want to swing a cat,” said the Parson; “that is a Russian
amusement rather than an English or a Swedish one, if all tales be
true; and you may depend upon it we shall fare all the better for their
presence: our skipper could never think of setting anything short of
turtle and venison before such very magnificent three-tailed bashaws.”
“Yes,” said Birger, “they are going to Petersburgh, too, where the
chances are, the bashaws will find some good opportunity of squaring
accounts with the skipper for any ill-treatment, before the steamer is
permitted to sail.”
All the while this conversation was going on, the illustrious passengers
were rapidly accomplishing the short passage from the shore to the
steamer, a whole flotilla of boats being employed in the service,
while the hurried click of the pauls, and the quick revolutions of the
windlass, as the chain-cable was hove short, showed that in the Captain’s
opinion, as well as that of the Mate, quite time enough had been wasted
already.
But the golden opportunity had been lost. English tides respect no man,
not even Russian ambassadors, and old Father Thames was yet to read them
a lesson on the text—
If you will not, when you may,
When you will, you shall have Nay.
While the vessel was riding to the ebb tide, as she had done all the
morning, a warp which had been laid out from her port quarter would
have canted her head well into the stream; and the tide, acting on her
starboard bow while the after-part was in comparatively still water,
would have winded her downwards, almost before her paddles were in
motion, or her rudder could be brought to act. But the turn of the tide
had reversed all this. The vessel had indeed swung to the flood, which by
this time was rattling up at the rate of five or six miles an hour, and
thus her bowsprit was looking the way she wanted to go; but a strong eddy
was now bubbling up under her starboard bow, and pressing it towards the
left bank, while a great lumbering Indiaman lay just ahead of her, and a
Hamburgh steamer, which had anchored a little higher up on her starboard
quarter, forbade all reversing of the engine and thus getting out of the
mess stern foremost.
The moment the anchor broke ground the helm was put hard a-port, and the
paddles were set in motion; but though from the tide alone the rudder had
some effect, the strength of the eddy was too much for her; round came
her head to port, as if she were going to take a leap at the embankment.
“Hard a-port!—hard a-starboard!—ease her!—stop her!—turn her a-head!”
were the contradictory orders bawled out almost simultaneously. If noise
and shouting could have got the steamer out of the scrape, there was no
lack of it; but all these cries, energetic as they were, produced no
effect whatever, beyond exciting a little suspicion in the mind of our
travellers (some of whom having been at sea before, knew the stem of a
ship from the stern) that the skipper was not altogether a “deacon in
his craft;” and thus giving a point to the Mate’s silent but expressive
shrug when the Parson had alluded to the shoals at the river’s mouth. At
last, an indescribable sensation of grating, and a simultaneous volley
of heterogeneous oaths, such as sailors shot their guns with on grand
occasions, announced the fact that she had taken the ground abaft.
This, however, as it turned out, was about the best thing that could
have happened, for it gave the skipper time to collect his senses; or,
what was more to the purpose, gave the Mate time to whisper in his ear;
and the rising tide was sure to float her again in ten minutes. By this
time a warp had been got out to a ship anchored upon the Surrey side,
an expedient which any sailor would have thought of before tripping
his anchor in the first instance. The end of it was passed round the
windlass and hove taut, and as the rising water slowly lifted the unlucky
vessel from her sludgy bed and a few turns brought a strain upon her,
she gradually slewed her head outwards. The steam was turned on, the
paddles went round; the black water began to fizz under her counter, as
if a million of bottles of stout had been poured into it—she was at last
a-weigh and fairly on her course, only about six hours after her proper
time.
“I tell you what,” said the Parson, as he dived down the companion to
inspect the submarine arrangements of the cabin, “I leave this vessel at
Christiansand, and I wish we were fairly out of her. This fellow knows no
more of sea-craft than a tailor. Kind Providence shield us, or we shall
come to grief yet!”